Inside Elections

The County Board of Supervisors approved the purchase of a new Voter Registration System on November 10, which will make way to much more efficient and cost-effective registration and election management processes.

The new system, DFM’s Elections Information Management System (EIMS), supports automated data entry using intelligent character recognition and will nearly eliminate the fully manual data entry process used today.

Currently, the voter registration process goes through four steps before a new voter is added.  For a more detailed explanation about the voter registration process, you can read our blog post from April 1.

In addition to actual voter registration, the system also supports Vote by Mail voter data, Election Officer and Polling Place assignments, petition management, precinct and district maintenance, election management, candidate filing, and reporting.

Our current voter registration system is 12 years old. It will not integrate with the new statewide voter registration database, VoteCal, that goes live in 2011.

HAVA funds will be released by the California Secretary of State (SOS) to cover first-time implementation costs.

We’ve already begun holding meetings to coordinate implementation of DFM EIMS. Over the next couple of months, we will be conducting the actual transition and learning how to operate the system. We expect to complete this project by the end of February 2010.

To learn more about the new system, click here to check out DFM.